1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, to forward error correction (FEC) and/or ECC long encoding and/or decoding within such communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. The primary goal within such communication systems is to transmit information successfully between devices. Unfortunately, many things can deleteriously affect signals transmitted within such systems resulting in degradation of or even complete failure of communication. Examples of adverse effects include interference and noise that may be caused by various sources including other communications, low-quality links, degraded or corrupted interfaces and connectors, etc.
Some communication systems use forward error correction (FEC) coding and/or error correction code (ECC) coding to increase the amount of information that may be transmitted between devices. When a signal incurs one or more errors during transmission, a receiver device can employ the FEC or ECC coding to try to correct those one or more errors.
A continual and primary directive in this area of development has been to try continually to lower the signal to noise ratio (SNR) required to achieve a given bit error ratio (BER) or symbol error ratio (SER) within a communication system. The Shannon limit is the theoretical bound for channel capacity for a given modulation and code rate. The ideal goal has been to try to reach Shannon's channel capacity limit in a communication channel. Shannon's limit may be viewed as being the data rate per unit of bandwidth (i.e., spectral efficiency) to be used in a communication channel, having a particular SNR, where transmission through the communication channel with arbitrarily low BER or SER is achievable.
However, in some instances, the SNR of a given channel may be as low as possible and unfortunately incur a BER or SER that does require the error correcting capability of the devices to perform successful communication of information between devices. In some applications, multiple decoding iterations (e.g., when using an iterative decoding approach) are needed. A great deal of effort has been directed to improve the performance of devices that operate using FEC coding and/or ECC, yet much room for improvement still exists including improving the performance of decoding operations within such devices.